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Meet the Team

Our Team

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    Chris Chong

    Team Lead

    Chris is a senior in mechanical engineering with a minor in statistics. In PhantomCor he leads the business side of the team and takes care of any external relations relative to PhantomCor. Outside of PhantomCor he also serves as President of ASME, and at the Innovation Studio at MEL.

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    Rena Kanegae

    Technical Lead

    Rena is a junior in mechanical engineering. In PhantomCor she leads the prototype team and oversees the creation of the mold. Outside of PhantomCor she also works at Caterpillar as a parallel co-op student.

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    Craig Soares

    Senior Engineer

    Craig is a senior in Bioengineering. He works primarily in modeling the relationships between various parameters in the liver and applying them to our liver model. Outside of PhantomCor, he's involved in a neuroscience lab researching how the brain processes speech.

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    Monika Kizerwetter

    Senior Engineer

    Hello! Monika is a senior in Bioengineering. As a member of PhantomCor she works on the molding process and the fabrication of gels. She is interested in tissue engineering as well as brain and ovarian cancer research, and conducts research focusing on developing new immunotherapies to be used in ovarian cancer treatments in Dr. David Kranz's lab on campus.

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    David Johnson

    Materials Lead

    David is a senior in Materials Science and Engineering at UIUC. He joined PhantomCor in Fall 2019 and is currently working as a part of the materials team. He is responsible for testing various material formulations to best replicate and model human tissues. Outside of PhantomCor, he is involved in soft materials research both on and off campus, and is a leader in several Christian groups on campus.

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    Jairaj Narendran

    Materials Engineering Intern

    Jairaj is a junior in Bioengineering and is additionally minoring in Materials Science and Engineering. In PhantomCor he works on the materials team and joined in Fall 2019. Outside of PhantomCor he's a part of the Biomedical Engineering Society.

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    Lauren Samanic

    Business Intern

    Lauren is a sophomore in Mechanical Engineering. She works on the business team in PhantomCor and joined in Fall 2019. Outside of PhantomCor she is involved in the Society of Women Engineers and Theta Tau.

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    Ethan Tsai

    Bioengineering Intern

    Ethan is a sophomore majoring in Bioengineering. He currently works on the prototype team and joined in PhantomCor Fall 2019. Outside of PhantomCor, he is involved with Illinois Business Consulting (IBC), Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), and Covenant Fellowship Church (CFC).

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    Andrew Ding

    Bioengineering Intern

    Andrew is a Freshman in Bioengineering. He currently works on the prototype team and joined PhantomCor in 2019. Outside of PhantomCor he's involved in various extracurriculars including squash (the sport), undergraduate research, and presenting papers for the Bioscience Journal at UIUC.

Mentors & Past Members

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    Hiba Shahid

    Mentor

    Hiba is the founder and previous Design Team lead of PhantomCor. Her interests are focused in nanotechnology and biosensors, and her favorite branch of medicine is cardiology. In addition to PhantomCor, Hiba also was a part of research focused on designing and testing a post-infarction cardiac biosensor.

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    Teresa Yang

    Mentor

    Teresa was a member and subgroup leader within the heart fabrication team. In addition, she served as President from Fall 2018-Spring 2019. Outside of PhantomCor her interests were in product design and research interest.

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    Viraat Goel

    Mentor

    Viraat previously managed PhantomCor’s media and was one of the team’s primary presenters in addition to being a part of the Design Team. Besides the Design Team, he was also active in Model UN, Engineering Ambassadors, and Student Council, and did research in a cell and tissue engineering lab.

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    Boeun Hwang

    Mentor

    Bo previously was the leader of the building subgroup. In addition, she is interested in artificial organ and cancer research. She works as a researcher focusing on polarization of cytokine-induced macrophages.

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    Joshua Au

    Mentor

    Joshua previously was a member of the fabrication team as well as the build team subgroup. He was a part of a cancer scholars program that seeks to push the frontier of cancer research. In addition, he did research in a computational and cell lab and developing a high-throughput sequencing technology.

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    Alex Hasnain

    Mentor

    As part of PhantomCor, Alex served as a member and subgroup leader within the heart fabrication team, primarily focusing on chamber and valve design. Outside of PhantomCor, he worked as a sepsis researcher in the Bashir Lab at Mills Breast Cancer Institute.

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    Hugh Yeh

    Mentor

    Within PhantomCor, Hugh was a member of the heart fabrication team. He primarily worked on mechanical testing and valve physiology. His interests include particle physics, with emphasis on tachyons and neutrinos; biophysics; and cellular mechanics.

  • Collaborators

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      Dr. Dobrucki

      Faculty Advisor

      Prof. Wawrzyniec Lawrence Dobrucki received his Ph.D. in chemistry from Ohio University, Athens, in 2003, and M.Sc. degree in bioengineering from Technical University of Wroclaw, Poland and Technical University of Hamburg, Germany. He is currently Associate Professor and Director of Professional Master's Program in the Department of Bioengineering with affiliations in the Carle Illinois College of Medicine and the Carle R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as the Medical University of Gdansk in Poland. He holds a full-time faculty position at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science, where he serves as co-chair for the Integrative Imaging theme and directs the Experimental Molecular Imaging Laboratory (EMIL). His expertise is in preclinical molecular imaging, and his fields of professional interests include the development of novel targeted multimodal imaging strategies to noninvasively assess tissue microenvironments and various biological processes in vivo, including therapeutic neovascularization, atherosclerosis, neoplastic progression and cancer response to experimental therapies.